Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

PITTSBURGH, August 19, 2008 -The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $10 million to the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) for the Vaccine Modeling Initiative (VMI), a research partnership involving the University of Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania State University and Imperial College London. The objective is to help select new vaccines that will have the best chance of stopping global infectious disease outbreaks. Headquartered at GSPH, VMI also includes collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, Medecins Sans Frontieres Epicentre, the University of Georgia, and computational modelers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. PSC scientist Shawn Brown is a co-principal investigator on the project.

Simulation of an epidemic disease spread throughout the United States using tools designed by the VMI. The colors represent the following: grey is the population density, red indicates infected population, and green are the segments that have recovered from the disease.